576 HOW DOES MAN CONSERVE HIS RESOURCES? 



burden even then included the taking of all the desirable things that were 

 being wasted by incompetent natives, and they brought over colonists — 

 whom the philosophers and moralists at home maligned, no doubt, in the 

 same pleasant fashion of our own day. And the colonists cut down the 



oaks, and plowed the 

 land, and built cities, 

 and made harbors, and 

 finally dusted their 

 busy hands and busy 

 souls of the grime of 

 labor and wrought 

 splendid temples in 

 honor of the benign 

 gods who had given 

 them the possessions 

 of the Italians and 

 filled them with power 

 and fatness. 



"Every once in so 

 often the natives 

 looked lustfully down 

 from the hills upon 

 this fatness, made an armed snatch at it, were driven back with bloody 

 contumely, and the heaping of riches upon riches went on. And more 

 and more the oaks were cut down — mark that ! — for the stories of 

 nations are so inextricably bound up with the stories of trees — until all 

 the plain was cleared and tilled ; and then the foothills were denuded, and 

 the wave of destruction crept up the mountain sides, and they, too, were 

 left naked to the sun and the rains. 



"At first these rains, sweeping down torrentially, unhindered by the 

 lost forests, only enriched the plain with the long-hoarded sweetness of the 

 trees ; but by and by the living rivers grew heavy and thick, vomiting mud 

 into the ever shallowing harbors, and the land soured with the undrained 

 stagnant water. Commerce turned more and more to deeper ports, and 

 mosquitoes began to breed in the brackish soil that was making fast be- 

 tween the city and the sea. 



"Who of all those powerful landowners and rich merchants could ever 

 have dreamed that little buzzing insects could sting a great city to death ? 

 But they did. Fevers grew more and more prevalent. The malaria- 

 haunted population went more and more languidly about their business. 



Motion- — U. S. Forest Service 

 Gully farm land badly in need of forestation. 



